A recent card from Chris Ambidge with a Doc and Raider: one in a series about travails with their cat.
D&R is a (a) gay, (b) Canadian (c) cartoon, often touching as well as funny. A couple samples to follow.
Archive for May, 2014
Doc and Raider
May 25, 2014Three more diverse
May 24, 2014Three recent cartoons on divergent subjects: a Bizarro with language play turning on ambiguity; a Scenes From a Multiverse with metacommentary by the characters; and another classic Watergate Doonesbury, from 1974, with the denominal verb to stonewall.
Piercing
May 23, 2014(Not much about language.)
It starts with a postcard from Xopher Walker, a photograph by an artist I was unfamiliar with, Paul Blanca (for maximum confusion, there’s also a photographer Paul Branca, and Google really truly wants to tell me about Branca rather than Blanca): the 1985 “Selfportrait decoration”, a male torso shot, showing a line of chest hair and the model’s (Blanca’s) left nipple, and in between a safety pin piercing in his pectoral muscle and, below that, a white composite flower (like a small chrysanthemum flower) looking much like a boutonnière. I’ve added a caption of my own: “Piercing, man, piercing” (a little pun).
“illegal”
May 22, 2014Yesterday’s Classic Doonesbury from 1974 (#1, here) looked at the foul mouth of Richard Nixon (and his aides) from Watergate days. Today (again from 1974) we get the President defining the limits of what counts, in U.S. law, as a prosecutable defense (in ordinary language, what counts as illegal):
(Bonus from the Watergate tapes: Nixon’s paranoid anti-Semitism, in his bitter ravings about the Jews.)
You’re Planting That Old Thing?
May 21, 2014So went the head for a piece by Michael Tortorello in the May 15th Home & Garden section of the New York Times. It begins with a riff on the catalpa tree, once a feature of yards in much of the U.S.:
Almost no one appreciates the catalpa tree, and few gardeners have planted one since the financial crisis. The one in the 1930s.
There’s more of this jokiness, but then Tortorello gets down to business:
In a broad sense, American homeowners have stopped spending money on all types of trees and shrubs. Bruce Butterfield, the market research director for the National Gardening Association, recorded a 46 percent drop in landscaping purchases in the four years after the financial panic (the 2008 edition). During roughly the same period, food-gardening sales increased 40 percent.
Three diverse
May 21, 2014This morning: a classic Doonesbury on foul language; a Rhymes With Orange citing the spurious “rule” that an English clause must not end in a preposition; and a Zippy looking back at an ad icon of the 1940s and 50s (“drink more flavored liqueurs”, says Judge Arrow).
Alan Fletcher
May 20, 2014More from my back files: graphic designer Alan Fletcher, creator of images on postcards Max Vasilatos sent me in 2008 and 2009.
Erudite but tailless
May 20, 2014From an accumulation of material over the years, this Calvin and Hobbes (from 9/14/92):
The strip is “about” Calvin’s lacking a tail, which Hobbes (as a tiger) naturally sees as a defect (while Calvin thinks he’s perfect as he is; it might not be too much to read Calvin’s position as related to male anxiety about penis size).
The point of linguistic interest is Calvin’s sophisticated vocabulary, often remarked on; bear in mind that Calvin is a six-year-old boy, yet he slings things like “the evolutionary perfection of earthly DNA”, “the culmination of creation”, and “aesthetic enhancement” (nicely combined with butt here).
Jane on Xmas Eve
May 19, 2014Another quotation from Jane Austen (again, thanks to Chris Ambidge) — this time from a letter written on Xmas Eve 1798:
Chris reminds me that Jane Austen was the daughter of a parish priest, which (I suppose) would put her in a postion to long for release from being agreeable, especially in seasons of celebration..
Accents?
May 19, 2014From several sources on Facebook (but ultimately from the Oatmeal webcomic), this item:
This is accent taking in all aspects of a variety of a language, not just the phonological aspects. In this case, phonology is barely involved (though you can imagine some of it, using stereotypes of upper-class British pronunciation)): it’s all about lexical choices, register/style, and conversational topic (leaning heavily towards the sexual) — obscure, perhaps archaic, and pompously rakish.
(This is another case in which I don’t really know whether the item is to be classified as a cartoon, or what.)